SCA-appropriate

December 14, 2012

Hmm... what to say about this. Well, let me put it to you this way. The dish has eggs and zucchini, two things my husband hates. He had three helpings.

Of course, there is plenty more to say about this recipe. It's another of the recipes from the Sunday dinner I made from Martino's The Art of Cooking. Catalonia had a very strong influence on medieval and renaissance Italy (and vice versa, of course), although that's something that we don't really think about much these days. Of course the influence was stronger in the south, the part of Italy from which my own family hails, but there was influence in the north as well. A dish like this is rich - note the use of spices and especially saffron. Of course zucchini would not have been the type of squash used. The type of squash used would have been different and is nigh impossible to get here even when it is in season, never mind in December. I'm told that in flavor and texture it is very similar to zucchini and that zucchini is an adequate substitute. That's what I used.

I made some other changes as well. The original wanted to be cooked with "good chopped lard." Well of course I can't use lard. I'm allergic to lard. I probably could have done something with one my non-pork bacons to approximate the use of animal fat, but I was expecting a friend to show up who cannot digest meat. (Our social circle seems to be a magnet for weird food allergies. I don't know why.) In other parts of the same book Martino allows for the use of olive oil as a substitute for lard; I felt that it would be acceptable here. There will be some who disagree with me; they're welcome to do so and to make the dish with lard if they so desire. I also did not simmer the squash in the fat for four hours. It did not need to simmer in fat for four hours. It would have burned.

Again, this was very well received. I was out of verjus, which was an optional ingredient here or else I would have included it with gusto. I think it would have benefitted this dish immensely because without it I kind of found the dish to be overly sweet. I've been assured that it's just me though. You can vary the spices according to your taste, although I'd advise not omitting the saffron unless you really must.

Squash in the Catalan Style (serves 10; approx. $1.24/serving)

10 zucchini, thinly sliced

1 stick butter

1/2 cup olive oil

1 cup vegetable broth

1 pinch saffron

1/4 cup raw sugar

1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom

4 egg yolks, beaten

1/2 cup grated peccorino

Equipment:

Large saucepan

Combine the butter and the oil in the saucepan and place over low heat until the butter is melted.

Add the zucchini and cook over very low heat until the squash is tender, stirring frequently.

Add the broth with the saffron. Increase the heat to a simmer.

Add the spices and sugar. Stir until the sugar is dissolved.

Pour a little bit of the hot broth into the egg yolks to temper them, then pour them back into the pot and cook thoroughly.

December 10, 2012

This was a very quick recipe that I made for last week's Sunday dinner. I'd gotten out of the habit of serving medieval food on Sundays for a variety of reasons. One of the reasons was that I felt like I was only referring to this one book. Don't get me wrong. I love this book. That's part of the problem. The problem is that whenever I think, "Oh, I'd like to do a medieval recipe," the first thing I do is grab this book. And then I stop. I love this book. This is a problem because I then stop referring to other books and soon this will become an al-Warraq blog instead of a general cooking blog. I don't speak enough Arabic to make this an al-Warraq blog, or to find the bathroom, or to get off the plane. So I have to restrain myself, and try to force myself to cook from other sources. Those other sources aren't nearly as wonderful, so I'd rather just make things up.

Don't worry. Next weekend is Martino Week - I'll be serving dishes from Martino, among other things.

At any rate, I was very excited to make this dish. I've had my eye on it for a while, I'm just usually stuck making vegetarian recipes for whatever reason. I suspect that it is a little wetter than it was originally intended to be. I used the water in which the chickpeas had been canned, which might have been too much. Also, the recipe called for "two ladlefuls" of verjus. My ladle is about 3/4 cup in volume. I don't know about his. I did make one major error in that the two spices at the end were not added. The spikenard I had on hand is frankly elderly and had begun to smell a lot more like the plastic jar in which it had been housed than like spikenard. It's not exactly a spice you can pick up at the local grocery around here. My stash of ground cloves had also disappeared - we've been doing some serious cleaning of the kitchen cabinets thanks to an infestation of pantry moths and it still hasn't turned up so I think it's just gone. This frustrated me because it meant that my dish was not an accurate re-creation despite my best efforts.

Despite my ultimate dissatisfaction with the accuracy of the re-creation the dish was well-received. Do you know who its biggest fan was? My daughter. Viking Baby was obsessed with getting every chickpea she could get her little spoon on out of the bowl, even to the extent of stealing them off her neighbor's plate. (This resulted in an quick lesson in table manners and tears. She isn't yet three, after all.) She liked the meat well enough and spooned as much of the cooking liquid as she could get onto her millet. So there you go - this is officially a toddler-approved dish, and apparently a medieval aristocrat approved dish as well.

Medieval Fast Meat Dish (serves 10 as a side dish; approx. cost per serving not available)

1 pound boneless leg of lamb, sliced thin

4 tablespoons olive oil

1 15-oz can chickpeas, with its liquid

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

1 1/2 cups verjus

1/4 cup tamari (soy sauce will work just fine)

1 teaspoon black pepper

1 teaspoon caraway seeds

6 grams ground spikenard (I omitted, see above)

6 grams ground cloves (I omitted, see above)

Equipment:

Saucepan

Heat the oil in the saucepan.

Add the meat, cinnamon and salt. Saute briefly.

Add the chickpeas with their liquid. Saute/boil until the meat is done.

Add the verjus with the tamari. Bring to a boil.

Simmer until the flavors marry. Remember, this is described as a "fast" dish, so don't leave it too long.

December 07, 2012

Usually I cook my dishes for dinner and I put them in a queue and write them up in their due time. Well, "in their due time" is relative. I've got things in the backlog that have been sitting there since May and they may will sit there until next May. I do what I can. Anyway, sometimes a dish is such a hit that people want the recipe right away. It is usually a surprise. That is the case with this recipe. I was kind of hesitant to serve it, and I would have been really hesitant to consider serving it for a feast. Fennel isn't a flavor that everyone likes. I like it. I like it too much. I have to have someone else pour ouzo for me, because I like that flavor so much that I will pour more than is possibly good for me. Other people make a face at the very word. I usually serve fennel cold and raw, though. This was served cooked, and cooked for a long-ish time at that. And it really was the hit of the night.

I also screwed it up. I must have misread it somehow, because I added verjus where none was apparently required. I know why I screwed it up. The original recipe consisted of two lines starting with "Fennel is cooked the same way as cauliflower," with cauliflower being described ten pages after fennel. (Medieval people were good cooks, and they were not stupid, but good editing was not one of their hallmarks.) Somehow I got it into my head that verjus was required here when it was not. I only realized that it was not required here now, as I went to write it up. This is surprising because that little touch of piquancy really made the dish. I'm going to include it in the instructions, although with an asterisk. You can do what you want; it was used often enough in other recipes in this volume that I became befuddled, and there are several other recipes in which Martino encourages the reader to accommodate one's own master's tastes.

Fennel Pottage (serves 10; approx. $0.93/serving)

5 bulbs fennel, finely chopped

1/2 cup olive oil

Water

1 cup vegetable broth

Pepper to taste - be generous (see instructions below)

Verjus* (optional - see notes above)

Equipment:

Large, deep saucepan

Colander

Put the fennel in the saucepan with enough water to cover generously. Bring to a boil.

Boil to cook about halfway through, then drain.

Wipe out the pan - carefully, don't burn yourself or you'll be sad - and return to the stovetop.

Heat the oil over medium heat. (The original called for lard and salt-cured meat or oil. I chose oil due to food allergies.)

December 01, 2012

You might have kind of wondered where I've been for the past couple of weeks. (Then again, you might not.) My computer died. I work on a laptop and the hinges broke. The thing was flat and the screen was green. It kind of needed a shot of penicillin. It needed to go to the shop for repair, and this took quite some time. I put it off for as long as I could, propping the stupid thing up and hoping I didn't need to sneeze, but when one lives with a toddler and three furbabies this is not really an effective solution for more than ten seconds. So just in time for Thanksgiving - possibly the single point in time when a food blogger is at her most useful - I was idle. Sigh. Oh well. It is back now, and it's not like I haven't been cooking. I have. Some of it, to the delight of some and the dismay/disdain of others, has even been medieval.

I knew I wanted to cook some period recipes last weekend. (I wanted to cook more of them than I actually did, but that's a whiny tale and Fearless Kitchen is not about whining.) I asked my husband to pick a region: Italy, France or Iraq. He picked Iraq, possibly because he knows that Annals of the Caliphs' Kitchens is my favorite cookbook medieval or modern and cooking from it always makes me smile. This recipe is no different - if you can even call it a recipe. The chapter heading is called "Boiled Vegetable Dishes - Their Varieties, Names and Properties." Now, before I got this book, and even if you were to be talking about medieval French or German cookery, if you were to come up to me and say, "I want to serve you some boiled cabbage and some boiled cauliflower," I would probably remember a pressing engagement on the other side of the continent. Either that or find a way to turn off your gas line for the benefit of humanity. Possibly both. This dish, though - it was incredible. I had three helpings of boiled cabbage. I hate cabbage. I hate boiled cabbage more than I hate cabbage in other forms. My hate is true hate, the kind that has whole volumes of legislation and pages in the criminal code in many states. I had three helpings. It is so incredibly simple and so cheap - if I hadn't spend more than was necessary on the stupid cauliflower it would have been even cheaper.

So al-Warraq gives a basic description: you boil the vegetables and you dress them in a sauce made of olive oil and murri, which many authorities agree that at least in this part of the world at this point is made in a way that is very similar to soy sauce and is in flavor nearly indistinguishable from soy sauce. I will let them do that work for me. Then he gives a list of vegetables that are commonly treated in this way. I had them on hand at the time. There were four ingredients, because I used two different vegetables. There weren't really many changes or innovations to make. I did make one change and it's very minor: I used wheat-free tamari, which is a soy sauce substitute used by people who need to avoid gluten for whatever reason. No one living in my home is actually gluten-free, but there are enough gluten-free folk in my life at this point that tamari is what I had on hand at the time. Soy sauce is significantly cheaper and will bring down your cost per serving. If you're serving a big SCA feast (for example, you know who you are) I'd go with the soy sauce unless you know there are some GF folk attending. (Again, you'll be able to find cauliflower cheaper than I did too, or you can just leave it out.)

Seriously. This is possibly the best way to prepare cabbage. I've done carrots this way too with great success, although not enough success to make me say "Wow I must eat three times my body weight in carrots."

Add the vegetables - each to its own saucepan, as they will cook at different rates. I think they present better separately as well but to each his own.

Boil the cauliflower until done to your desired degree of tenderness - this will vary from person to person, although if the room stinks you've probably overdone it. I like a little bit of firmness to mine. Drain well.

Boil the cabbage for a while, but drain as soon as the slightest hint of an odor develops. Seriously, be very vigilant. Don't let it change color at all. Drain well.

When the vegetables have drained, arrange them on your serving platter. (I served mine in a roasting pan because I knew I would have to reheat them in the oven at least briefly. This had the happy effect of containing any excess dressing.)

Whisk together the soy sauce and the olive oil until they are emulsified.

October 17, 2012

I've been avoiding medieval recipes lately. There are a few reasons for that. Some of them are perfectly good reasons. I don't often have time to come up with a proper list before going to the grocery store these days. While I'm perfectly willing to play fast and loose with modern recipes, adapting them to my circumstances and tastes, I try to be a little more faithful when re-creating historical recipes. That doesn't mean that I won't make adaptations, I just don't like to. I have a favorite medieval cookbook (this one). I feel kind of like I turn to it too often. Believe me, I would use it every day if I thought I could get away with it. There are some other reasons that I won't get into here because they're less valid. I don't want to let them stop me from doing what I do, from enjoying an activity that has always brought me pleasure. Giving a voice to those reasons, especially a written voice, gives them validity that they simply do not merit. Instead, I shall do my best to ignore them and carry on.

Because frankly, there is no excuse for not cooking something like this. It has three ingredients - four if you count the water. I had used the chard in another recipe. Chard stalks can be treated like asparagus, and I frankly think this would be a tasty if not necessarily time-and-place-appropriate treatment for asparagus too. So you've got this vegetable that is basically a bonus vegetable - if you've bought chard for the leaves you've got the stalks just sitting around anyway. Sumac is available in fairly large quantities in the right markets, and it doesn't have to be an ethnic market either. I got a giant sack of it at Wegmans' for crying out loud. And olive oil. According to the author it will help you with your excess of yellow bile, and that's important to anyone who travels to places where the water supply might be a little iffy. (Note: I'm not prescribing any actual medical course of treatment. I'm commenting on medieval medical ideas. It could have been worse; I don't know how far the humoral theory had re-penetrated the West by the time this volume came out in Baghdad but I'd take my chances with al-Warraq's advice thank you.)

My daughter absolutely loved this dish. So did my husband. I did too. It is simple, it is delicious and it is easy. Again, there is no excuse for not making it.

Chard Stalks with Sumac (serves 4; approx. $0.60/serving)

Stalks from 1 generous bunch chard (I halved them to fit into the pot)

Approx. 1/2 cup ground sumac

2 - 3 tablespoons olive oil

Equipment:

Large saucepan

Colander

Plate

Fill the pot with water and bring to a boil.

Boil the chard stalks until they reach your desired level of doneness. I prefer my vegetables to be a little on the crisp side.

Drain them. The original recipe encouraged the cook to press them to remove excess moisture and I did not do this. I believe that this is more necessary the longer the vegetables are boiled.

October 07, 2012

There's something going around. My friend Hugh calls it the Dreaded Lurgy, which I think he got from a BBC Radio show when he was a kid. It sounds about right, and it has hit me hard. I haven't been cooking this week. I've been lying here aching and lacking the energy to do more than go, "Ugh." Seriously, it's been icky, and to be honest I shouldn't have even been allowed around food. I think I'm starting to come around, although I still feel pretty lousy. I'm able to sit here and write up recipes instead of looking at pictures of abandoned buildings for starters. Anyway, since I haven't been cooking I'm able to work on my backlog, and that's a good thing. That's a good thing because some of these recipes have lingered for a very long time.

How long you ask? This one has lingered since May 6. I was looking at my menu for the big German feast. Everything on my intended menu was documentable to Germany except one sauce. My primary sauce was a shallot sauce to be served with the Roast Beef, but one of my favorite people has a strong allergy to raw onion. I knew he'd be there and I wanted to serve something he could eat as well. I'd initially intended to serve Horseradish Sauce for his benefit - he loves horseradish and horseradish is indeed tasty - but the horseradish sauce is either Italian or Spanish depending on your point of view. I wanted this to be purely German. At the last possible minute I went through and found an alternative sauce and this was it.

There are three whole ingredients to this sauce. The original did call for just the unripe grapes instead of their juice, but I'm afraid that those are in rather short supply at most of the markets in the greater Boston area. I used verjus, which is the juice of unripe grapes. It is not an uncommonly required medieval ingredient. You can spend an awful lot of money on the stuff from specialty markets, you can order it from Amazon.com (note the convenient little link down at the bottom of your screen!) or you can go to a "Mediterranean" market and spend not much money at all on a larger quantity. Your choice. Maybe you don't have a "Mediterranean" market near you. The original is described as being good for fresh meat, for one day, with "goose, fresh pork and beef." I haven't tried it with goose but I can see where the sourness would go very well with that particular fowl.

September 09, 2012

Recipe Source: Scappi, Bartolomeo. The Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi. Terrence Scully, trans. Originally published 1570. This edition published by University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2008 p. 485.

You've all heard me complain about my strong distaste for carrots in the past. I just don't like them. They are too sweet for my tastes, and the kind of sweetness they exhibit has only one reaction for me. It tastes like sick. I have the same reaction to sweet potatoes, for the record. I get quite a few carrots from the farm share, unfortunately. It's understandable. They're super healthy and they grow very well in New England. I just hate them. Fortunately we entertain often enough that I can generally foist them off on my guests and not actually be forced to consume them myself. I served this at an Open House the week we held the jam-making workshop and we managed to get I think twelve servings out of it. I did not actually eat it. When I saw that sugar was going to be added to the recipe, with additional sugar to be sprinkled on top, I knew this dish was not for me. Maybe for you.

It went over very well for those guests who did partake. I did make a few changes, which were strictly necessary. I used a family recipe for the crust. I've taken some criticism for this recently, since my family recipe certainly contains shortening and not lard and is not documentable to the sixteenth century. You know, containing shortening and all. There are two reasons for this. One is that pastry is not my strong suit, nor is it the focus of this dish. The pastry is a vehicle for the stuff that goes inside it. I'm not going to wrestle with an unknown product for a result that is only minimally beneficial to the end product. I'm going to use a recipe that I know, whose whims I can predict. If I were a pastry chef or even remotely talented at pastry it might be a different story. Then again, it might not. The other reason is an allergy to pork and its products. Yes, I'm going to substitute shortening for lard, because if I consume lard I'll die. I'm not about to serve products that I can't taste. That's stupid. So is consuming products that will KILL YOU in the name of historical accuracy. If someone else wants to take that risk that's fine for them. Personally, I'll pass. I like breathing.

Anyway, I omitted a couple of ingredients due to availability issues. Maybe I could have done something about them. Maybe not. The thing is, Scappi was the personal cook to not one but two Popes. He cooked for Conclaves. He worked for cardinals. This was a time when the princes of the Church really had a hard time with the whole "poverty" thing, and while Scappi's recipes show that he made use of pretty much anything that came into his kitchen he also had access to quite a lot of money. I think it's okay to spend a little less if I am not entertaining the Pope, which I am not.

On a separate and probably inappropriate note, when I was describing the dishes that evening, I mentioned that this dish came from a chef who had cooked for two Popes. One thing led to another and the Carrot Tourte became a Papist Pie. I don't think that the pie has anything to do with actual religious affiliation, but some of the guests may be looking for the dish under that title. If that applies to you, here it is.

Carrot Tourte (serves about 12; approx. $2.56/serving)

1 double-crust pie crust of your choice

24 ounces carrots, peeled and chopped

4 cups chicken broth

Water

1 bunch fresh marjoram (the original called for mint as well, I omitted it as my husband is allergic)

12 ounces pecorino or Parmesan cheese (Parmesan is more correct, pecorino is cheaper and what we keep on hand)

Put your carrot bits into the saucepan. Add water to cover generously.

Bring the water to a boil. Boil until the carrots are about half done.

Drain the carrots. Return them to the pan and cover with the chicken broth.

Bring to a boil again. Boil until the carrots are tender.

Drain. Transfer to the mixing bowl.

Add the cheeses, eggs, herbs, pepper, 1 ounce cinnamon, raw sugar and butter. Use the immersion blender to process to a paste. It's okay if the paste has small chunks of carrot in it; in period this would have been done with knives and patience. The goal is to mix the ingredients well so no one gets a piece that consists entirely of mozzarella and cinnamon.

Roll out one of the pie crusts and line your pie plate with it.

Fill the pie crust.

Roll out the other crust, vent and seal. There is another step in the original involving a twist of crust added around the edge. My talents to not lend themselves to this step except possibly as part of a sketch comedy routine.

Combine the cinnamon sugar and rosewater and brush the top of the pie with it.

Bake until the internal temperature registers 145︒, about half an hour.

Serve. I would recommend letting it cool for at least ten minutes before serving to let the cheeses set.

My big medieval German feast gave me the opportunity to learn something about something that I'd frankly never been more than mildly curious about before. I'd fallen into a trap that is very easy to fall into. I made assumptions based on stereotypes that had little if any basis in any reality, let alone medieval reality. It was wrong of me. I then used a disability - my pork allergy - to avoid learning more. This was even more wrong of me. The big German feast forced me to get over those misconceptions, realize that my only actual handicap was my own brain, and move on. I learned a lot about medieval German cuisine. One thing that I learned was that I actually really, really like medieval German food. It's not all pork. It's not even mostly pork. There is pork, to be sure, and some sources rely more heavily on pork than others. But there are other proteins out there, and there are a lot of really tasty flavors to be found that aren't quite like the flavors found elsewhere in Europe at the same time. (They happen to be flavors that do match really well with beer, I'll give you that.)

This recipe is described as a chicken "pasty," and to me a " pasty" is usually more of a hand pie than, well, a pie. When you read the description, though, it tells you to "cut a whole chicken in two and..." If you are eating a whole chicken then that is not a hand pie. That is a pie pie. That's not what I did here, though. I used chicken thighs. I used them because I had them in the refrigerator and needed to use them up, and I used them because my daughter is two and unlikely to understand the words, "Please be careful not to choke on the bones." I also had every intention of making this into actual pasties, but this was Not A Good Pastry Day. The pastry was not cooperative, so it's just as well. I also used beef bacon instead of pig bacon because of the affore-mentioned allergy. You can use pig bacon if you want, it will bring your cost per serving down significantly, although I have to say that I really enjoyed the beef here.

Pie with Chicken and Bacon (serves 10; approx. $1.15/serving)

1 double-crust pie crust (I used a family recipe; you can use store-bought if you've a mind to)

1 - 1 1/2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken thighs, chopped

1 package (10 oz) beef bacon, diced

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

1 package sage leaves, chopped

Equipment:

Saute pan

Slotted spoon

Pie plate

Cookie sheet (optional)

Rolling pin

Preheat your oven to 425︒.

Heat your saute pan.

Add the bacon and fry until the fat renders out of the bacon. If you want to add a little oil to the pan to keep the bacon from burning go ahead; the original didn't call for this but they didn't have smoke alarms in 12th century Germany and you almost certainly do.

Evacuate the bacon to a plate or something; I like to drain it on paper towels but it's up to you. Try not to snack on the bacon as you cook up the chicken thighs with the sage and the salt.

When the chicken is cooked, return the bacon to the pan and remove it from the heat.

Roll out your pie crusts. Line the bottom of your pie plate with a crust.

Fill the crust with the contents of your saute pan.

Top with the second crust. Crimp and seal. Cut some vents in the top crust.

Bake until the crust is done. The internal temperature of the pie should be 165︒.

August 08, 2012

Beans are easy. Too bad I kind of never want to see another one for as long as I live. I kind of feel like I'm running out of things to say about them. They're... well, they're beans. They kind of bean around, doing their little bean things, and then you eat them, and they bean around in your gut for a while, and then they bean their way out of you one way or another. They're healthy. They're tasty. Case closed, right? Sigh.

Beans have been around in one form or another roughly since the dawn of agriculture. There was a time when I could have probably told you exactly when the first evidence of legume cultivation enters the archaeological record but I don't care enough to remember it and I left that book at home today. They just make good sense. They return nitrogen to the soil, which helps to keep fields fertile. They pack a powerful punch of nutrition - fiber, protein, other stuff - in a very small package. Once dried they can be stored more or less indefinitely. Some varieties can be ground into flour and baked into things like bread. This, in some cultures, has led to their being relegated to "peasant food." They were consumed all over the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East, but they aren't exactly treated as fine dining.

There are exceptions to that rule, of course, and one of those exceptions is al-Warraq. Many medieval recipe collections - not just those from the Middle East - consist solely of highly complex recipes that only the super-rich could have possibly even considered, recipes that would still require an army of specialists to prepare even with modern equipment. Vegetarian recipes exist - especially in the Christian world, where depending on the time and place they were a religious requirement - but they are not particularly common. Al-Warraq has given us a huge volume of vegetarian and even vegan recipes that are sometimes even very simple, recipes that sometimes require absolutely no cooking at all if you've got canned beans. (He, of course, did not have canned beans. But I do.)

This is one such recipe. I served it for my big medieval more-or-less Baghdadi feast up in Maine this year. It is easy. I mean it. If you use canned beans, as I did, there really isn't much need to actually boil the beans. That's been done for you. I omitted the rue - fresh rue can give some people a severe reaction, and while it is sometimes possible to find dried rue I thought it best when so far from medical attention to not take the chance. Sometimes I'll use rosemary instead - they're both vaguely resinous evergreen plants, found in the same geographic area, and can be vaguely bitter - but in this case I decided to just leave it out instead.

Like I said, this is an incredibly easy recipe that you can bring along to a picnic, potluck or barbeque.

This is another recipe that I served at the big medieval feast I did up in Maine. This is one of the two recipes I managed to do ahead of time and freeze. On the one hand this is a good thing because I was able to save time and energy by doing the recipes when I had both of them instead of scrambling around like a lunatic and leaving the kitchen looking like a murder scene. There was also the saving on ice, since both of the meat dishes I made froze so completely solid that they functioned like block ice in the coolers and did not thaw. Indeed, they stayed frozen much longer than the ice that I did buy! On the other hand when I say that the meat dishes did not thaw I mean it. Even though the temperature topped ninety that day, the meat did not thaw. Even though we put it into a blazing-hot oven, it did not thaw. This dish thawed enough that we were able to serve most of it as a second course. The other one did not.

This dish was certainly popular enough. I think it's the dill. Dill is a popular summer flavor; people associate with a cooling sensation in their minds. I don't know why that is, but they do. It also has a "carminative" effect, which is only to the greater good when you're serving a huge quantity of bean dishes as I was that night! It's a very easy dish to make, too, so you don't have to fuss much with it. Lamb or mutton would probably be more authentic, but they weren't specified in the original - "stew meat" was all that was required, and beef was certainly consumed - and beef was significantly cheaper and more accessible.

Beef Stew with Chickpeas and Dill (serves 12; approx. $1.40/serving)

2 pounds beef stew meat

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 teaspoon kosher salt

1 teaspoon ground coriander

1 cinnamon stick

1 15-oz can chickpeas, drained and rinsed

1 tablespoon ground cumin

1 large onion, chopped

1 bunch dill, chopped

Water to cover

Equipment:

Dutch oven or stew pot

Heat the oil in the Dutch oven.

Add the meat and brown.

Add the remaining ingredients with water to amply cover. Bring to a boil over high heat.

Reduce heat and simmer quietly until the meat is tender. Skim the mixture occasionally.